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Monday, November 05, 2007

The Empire

I have been attempting to get a very concise and simple 2 page paper on the Fourier transform uploaded to the arxiv. First, I established electronically that I appeared to have posting rights only to the physics arxiv. Since I thought that hep-th might be more appropriate, I requested an endorsement from 2 people last week. One has yet to reply but the other, a highly respected professional theoretical physicist from the northern hemisphere, replied very promptly and sent an email to the arxiv that same day confirming his wish to act as my endorser.

Alas, the arxiv rules now require that endorsers be active users of hep-th, so my potential endorser was sent an email explaining that he wasn't qualified to endorse for hep-th. If anyone who is qualified to endorse for hep-th would like to take up this case, it would be greatly appreciated. Anyway, people brilliant enough to spell my name correctly may obtain a copy of the paper here.

I have noticed that electrical engineers tend to deal with Fourier Transform Pairs [FTP]:

The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal ProcessingBy Steven W Smith, PhDChapter 11: Fourier Transform Pairs“For every time domain waveform there is a corresponding frequency domain waveform, and vice versa. For example, a rectangular pulse in the time domain coincides with a sinc function [i.e., sin(x)/x] in the frequency domain. Duality provides that the reverse is also true; a rectangular pulse in the frequency domain matches a sinc function in the time domain. Waveforms that correspond to each other in this manner are called Fourier transform pairs. Several common pairs are presented in this chapter.”http://www.dspguide.com/ch11.htm

Both theoretical mathematicians and many physicists appear to ignore these FTP pairs.

Yet there are both 1) Time Dependent and 2) Time Independent versions of the Schrodinger Equation that appear to be consistent with Fourier Transform Pairs?HyperPhysics GSU-UShttp://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/scheq.html

To those who can't find the paper - you have to use the sciprint search engine, not the search box on the front page.

That was quite mind-expanding. I hadn't read Carl's stuff before. So he has this algebra in which the particle masses show up as quantum numbers, and you want to apply the inverse of Kapranov's map to it, and recover the whole Standard Model - is that a fair summary?

"... the other, a highly respected professional theoretical physicist from the northern hemisphere, replied very promptly and sent an email to the arxiv that same day confirming his wish to act as my endorser.

"Alas, the arxiv rules now require that endorsers be active users of hep-th, so my potential endorser was sent an email explaining that he wasn't qualified to endorse for hep-th."

Glad to see that the moderation of arxiv by people like JD is not leading to excessive petty officialdom, red tape, bureaucracy, etc., in place of science (just as string "theory" replaces HEP predictions with an impressive array of mainstream religious orthodoxy about 10 d, 11 d, branes, etc.).

As we have unfortunately seen, arxiv is no longer the free repository it was intended to be. There is no good reason why Kea should not be able to post. Mediocrity can be good for careers, and the place is crowded with papers on strings, branes and "dark energy."

Proponents of these speculations claim to be secular, but follow their strings, branes etc. with religious fervour. I hope to see your paper soon, perhaps we will do one together sometime.

The more the Cornell arXiv succeeds in guarding its content from outsider contamination, the more its insiders isolate themselves from the new ideas that will lead to understanding how physics really works, so, the Princes of the ArXiv are sealing their own doom to that most terrible fate: being irrelevant.

Back in the 1950s the comic strip Pogo (set in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp) was popular. Here is a modified version of a Pogo poem originally entitled "The Prince of Pompadoodle':

The Princes of the ArXiv

The Princes of the ArXivlived behind a castle wall, behind a moat, behind a guardof twenty soldiers tall.

The Princes of the ArXiv were the safest men they say ...They sat alone, safe, locked alive, to count another day.

The Princes of the ArXiv may hoard each empty hour, but so what ? No predictions come from the silent stony tower.

Tony Smith

PS - As to doug's comment about "Fourier Transform Pairs", it seems to me that the duality is pretty much the position space / momentum space duality, which has a nice interpretation in Clifford Algebra physics, as shown by Dennis Marks has shown in 2003 paper "A Binary Index Notation for Clifford Algebras" where he said: "... Complementarity between space-time and momentum-energy is achieved by bit inversion, which interconverts between position representation and momentum representation. Treating momentum as a Clifford covector has the virtue of automatically enforcing the Heisenberg commutation relation as a consequence of the commutation and anti-commutation propeerties of the Clifford elements. ...".

Tony, that's an interesting comment on covectors and the Fourier transform and I will think about it more. My interests have been in internal symmetries and I have largely avoided learning about Clifford algebra and Fourier transforms.

I look forward to you starting a blog of your own.

And Kea, is there some rule that says that you can't give us a link to your paper? Making people suffer through searching on sciprint seems to me a way of reducing readership.

Carl, I don't have anywhere else to put the paper. One day I will buy myself a cute domain name, but at present I'm still on a tight budget. Besides, I'm sure we're all smart enough to figure out how sciprint works - eventually.

I should also mention that WordPress allows you to import content from another blog, if you're thinking of switching over. So moving over there is pretty painless. PDF files can be uploaded because they are a form of image file.

Of course things might not be as simple as I guess. It could be that you can only upload pdf files if you pay for the extra thingy that lets me put my hardhat picture up. But I suspect that a free account at WordPress can host pdf files.

And by the way, the next time you release it, please put it in pdf form so I don't have to. PostScript is somewhat painful to deal with for me, and the TeX programs I've worked with put out acrobat just as easily as postscript. And I won't have to go through this horrible anti spam kluge.

I don't want to use postscript, but my latex editor has problems generating pdf and I don't have the ps-pdf converter. There is a free trial at Adobe, but only for 5 files and I now only have 1 free conversion left, which I'm keeping for my thesis. Thanks for the upload, Carl! This is a good motivation for setting up a Wordpress blog.

kneemo, you can learn more about arxiv endorsement here. Note that the criteria for eligibility are vague, and phrased in terms of 'professionalism'. I am not qualified to endorse on gr-qc etc, despite having previous papers there.

If you use Windows you can install Cygwin/X, which acts as a wrapper for GNU/Linux tools, gives you X windows, and (if you elect to do so) includes an installation of tex, latex, xdvi, dvips, ps2pdf etc which can be used to author PDF files.

I use Ubuntu Linux, which includes all those things as well, is free and relatively easy to install and dual-boot with Windows on a PC. You can eve try it out non-destructively, since once you burn the disc you can boot from it without installing.

An even simpler and free option is to install cutePDF, which simply acts as a virtual "printer" on your system but really "prints" all it's output to a PDF file. It can convert anything to PDF.

Thanks Philip! The second option sounds simple enough. I will check it out ... damn! I don't have admin rights on the UC computer here, so cutePDF won't install. First thing I need is my own computer ...

Cygwin/X might work out for you, since "installing" it is just putting it somewhere in your hard-drive (via downloading from the webpage). It doesn't require admin rights. Not exactly simple to use though. It's fine if you have some experience with Linux/Unix. If not, it will take you a bit of time to get set up but once done it's a good long-term solution to latex use on windows.

With respect to Cornell arXiv endorsers, here is an example I find interesting:

According to the arXiv web site: "Sean Carroll is qualified to endorse. ...Can endorse for astro-ph, gr-qc, hep-ph and hep-th."

With respect to Sean Carroll's view of work other than his own, in a 1 November 2007 post on CV he said: "... A recent paper by Brownstein and Moffat claims to fit the Bullet Cluster using modified gravity rather than dark matter. If that were right, and the theory were in some sense reasonable, it would be an interesting and newsworthy result. So, you might think, the job of any self-respecting cosmologist should be to work carefully through this paper (it’s full of equations) and figure out what’s going on. Right?

I’m not going to bother....These folks aren’t crackpots, but they still face the challenge ... Tell me right up front exactly how your theory explains how a force can point somewhere other than in the direction of its source, and why your theory miraculously reproduces all of the predictions of the dark matter idea ... And people just don’t do that. ...".

that the "... paper by Brownstein and Moffat ...[is] full of equations ...", but Sean Carroll is "not going to bother" "to work carefully through this paper ... and figure out what’s going on".

The conclusion that I draw from this is that Sean Carroll has a belief (in the religious sense) that the approach of Brownstein and Moffat is wrong, but refuses to test that belief by actually evaluating the equations that he admits are in their paper.

It seems to me that his attitude seems consistent with the Cornell arXiv practice of blacklisting ideas unpopular with its administrators, and it is my belief that such attitudes and practices are as harmful to today's physics as were the attitudes and practices of the Inquisition to the physics of Galileo and Bruno.

Thanks, Louise! But regarding this paper, there are now about 10 copies around the web. Next time I might take up the offer.

It is my belief that such attitudes and practices are as harmful to today's physics as were the attitudes and practices of the Inquisition to the physics of Galileo and Bruno.

This might well be true. Fortunately, the harm done to said physicists, corporeally speaking, cannot be done by the establishment today. My toenails might be falling off from waitressing in shoes that don't fit, but they weren't pulled off by a smelly monk with a pair of hot tongs.

Ok, I recognise that you were being a bit hyperbolic in your last comment. I'm not a hep-th person at all, so I'd like to ask, to what extent is this really the case?

If applying for a job as a theoretical physicist (postdoc or professor), to what extent are papers published only in the arXiv actually helpful? I can see that being the case if they are cited extensively, but otherwise it seems likely that articles not appearing in a refereed journal wouldn't help much in getting a job.

At my school, for instance (and this is especially true now that the Federal government's Research Quality Framework is in place), the only papers that count towards our "research productive" status, and hence funding, promotion, grants etc are those in "high-quality" journals. What counts as a "high quality" journal is subject to the whim of an RQF panel. Even most peer-reviewed conference proceedings wouldn't count. I could put papers in the arXiv all day long but it wouldn't get me anything unless they eventually got into a journal. Is the situation significantly different in theoretical physics?

Philip said "... If applying for a job as a theoretical physicist (postdoc or professor), to what extent are papers published only in the arXiv actually helpful? ... it seems likely that articles not appearing in a refereed journal wouldn't help much in getting a job. ....".

Yes, Philip, it is true that refereed publications (particularly in "high-quality" journals) are (next to glowing references from establishment physicists) the prime currency for getting a job in the physics establishment.

However, if your work is banned from hep-th, the "high-quality" journals will be very unlikely to publish your work, so being banned from hep-th (a decision made by moderators at the Cornell arXiv) is a major blow to your career hopes.

Tony Smith

PS - Further, many high-energy physicists world-wide read hep-th regularly, but not gen-ph, so being banned from hep-th seriously limits the exposure your ideas get, even if you are allowed to post in gen-ph.